A Critical Look at the Ma'abarot

Ma’abarot – The Israeli Transit Camps, directed by Dina Zvi Riklis, narrated by Yael Abecassis, is a very hard-hitting and highly critical documentary look at the treatment that new immigrants to Israel received during the early years after the establishment of the state.  This is a story of racism and oppression.

When masses of new immigrants began to flood the gates of the country – from Arab lands and from Europe – temporary tent camps were built to house them.  These tent camps were later replaced with shacks.  Some of the immigrants lived in these camps for more than 10 years, which is shocking to think about since the conditions were so terrible. 

In a well-documented manner, the film reveals the story through interviews with historians, archival footage, government documents, newspaper clippings, and most crucially, personal stories told by individuals talking about their memories and traumas from that time.  These personal stories make up the most important part of the film – retelling memories that can bring you to tears.  There are the stories of siblings who suddenly disappear, kidnapped by health workers who were somehow convinced that these children were better off removed from their parents’ households.  There are the humiliations of being sprayed with DDT and terribly painful hot wax treatments to remove ringworm.  There are the stories of children removed from their families and sent to kibbutzim for schooling, where they were looked down upon and their culture and music were denied. They were forced to speak only Hebrew and when they went home to visit their parents in the transit camps they often found themselves ashamed of them and their broken Hebrew.

Originally, these transit camps held a diverse group of immigrants from countries such as Iraq, Romania, Turkey, Morocco and Holocaust survivors from Poland. There was a clear inequality in the treatment of the immigrants -- the Ashkenazi immigrants received housing within two years, and the Mizrahi immigrants (Jews from Arab lands) were left behind to wallow in the terrible conditions of the camps.  This situation was compounded by the influx of reparations monies which permitted so many survivors to buy their own homes and cars.  Not that they didn’t deserve these monies, but it helped to create a large middle class, leaving the Mizrahi immigrants even farther behind.

Ma’abarot, a documentary film (83 minutes), tells of poverty, hardships, suicides and despair, all of which are part of a terrible story of mistreatment at the hands of the authorities – a story that needs to be told and remembered.  The film is available from Go2Films.

Father-son relations

Baba Joon, directed by Yuval Delshad, is a new Israeli feature film which won five Israeli  Ophir awards this year, including for best film, cinematography, art direction and score. The title of the film is a Farsi term of endearment, similar to "papa".  In fact, the film is in both Hebrew and Farsi. 

This is a story of a multi-generational family, living on a religious moshav in the Negev during the 1980s.  Yitzhak runs the family turkey business, which his father built up when they emigrated from Iran. Yitzhak, as his father was before him, is very strict with his son, demanding that he continue the ways of the family.  Now, he wants his son, Moti, to learn the business.  It's hard work and not very exciting for a growing adolescent boy, who is more interested in tinkering and inventing things in the family's junkyard.   

On another level, this is a story of the immigrant generation clashing with the creative and vibrant Israeli-born  generation over issues of family, tradition and personal freedom -- one generation is keeping the old ways of life and the other is inventing new ones.

Although a peripheral figure, the boy's mother has the role of peace-maker in the family. She tells her husband, Yitzhak, who is a domineering and stubborn father, "A tree that can't bend in a storm will break."

According to the filmmaker (from the film's website) -- Conflicts between father and son take place in every country in the world, in any profession, whether in a city or a village or any patriarchal society where men hold all the authority and pass it down through the generations. Every parent’s desire to care for their children’s future and keep them close is natural, and yet it clashes with every young person’s will to forge a path of their own, sometimes far away from their parents. In the extreme cases where the parent insists on stopping his child’s will, he will often find himself falling short of his goal and alienating his children instead.

This is not a complex story, but it is certainly touching, compelling and even a bit exotic.  In this day and age, when our relations with Iran are so tense and people are truly worried about preventing a nuclear disaster, along comes a new filmmaker who creates a semi-autobiographical statement that reminds us that many Israelis originally came from Iran.

Baba Joon is produced by United King Films.  Check out the film's website to view the trailer and for distribution info.

Amos Gitai

Filmmaker Amos Gitai (born in 1950) served in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 as a reserve soldier, at which time his helicopter was shot down. In 1977 he began directing documentary films for Israel Television. After his film House was censored by the television authorities, and when his subsequent film Field Diary met with much criticism in Israel, Gitai moved abroad. He trained as an architect at the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D., 1986) and lived in Paris for many years. He returned to live in Israel in 1993. Gitai's films deal with themes of exile, emigration, and political issues relevant to the current reality in Israel.

In addition, his films explore the boundaries of a critical view from within. His film Berlin-Jerusalem is a shattering view of the Zionist dream, and Kippur is a graphic antiwar film (based on some of his own experiences during the Yom Kippur War). His trilogy Devarim, Day after Day and Kadosh takes place in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem and explores, with a critical eye, societal issues in each of those cities.

A prolific and controversial filmmaker, Gitai is one of the Israeli directors who have received accolades worldwide including prizes at Cannes, the distinction of Cavalier of the Arts from the Minister of Culture of France (1999) and retrospectives of his work have been organized in Europe and at the MOMA in New York City. In Israel, however, his films are criticized for being disjointed, non-linear and critical of Israel. Many say this is due to the jealousy of his colleagues due to his critical success on the international level and the resentment of the critics to his having lived and worked abroad. In Israel, he was the recipient of an achievement award from the Jerusalem Film Festival (2002).

A recent documentary film entitled Gitai – In Search of his Carmel by Ran Tal (2009), was shot while Gitai was researching locations and preparing for his recent feature film, Carmel (which premiered in 2009). This documentary is compelling in that it provides the viewer with insight into Gitai's unique way of creating a film -- his artistic process which is always dynamic and the script which is always developing.

We meet Gitai face-to-face and he talks about his films – 25 documentaries and 16 feature films. He discusses the earlier films that have an emphasis on theme and the later films, such as Free Zone, that experiment with the traditional definitions of narrative and form. Gitai talks about people on the move all around the world, and the fact that his parents were immigrants and how the subject of emigration and immigration fascinates him. We watch as he is creating a scene of his mother, reading from her letters to him from London when he was 10 years-old, talking about how she does not feel at home in any of the places that she has lived – not Vienna, Berlin, London or Paris. This theme of people on the move is a theme that can be seen not only in Israeli films but also in American and European films of recent years.

Gitai – In Search of his Carmel is part of a series of documentary films about "Culture Heroes" and is available from Ruth Diskin Films.

For those interested in reading more about Amos Gitai, a new book has become available -- Amos Gitai: Exile and Atonement by Ray Privett, which can be downloaded free from the website of Cinema Purgatorio.

Uprooted

I always find films that weave together the personal with the national turn out to be the most interesting. Last week at the Jewish Film Festival at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, I attended the premiere screening of Longing, directed by Effi Banai, a complex film in the style of a personal documentary, telling the filmmaker's own story, and placing it into the national context.

Effi Banai grew up in the neighborhood of Kfar Shalem in southeastern Tel Aviv. His family lived in a housing project, right near a destroyed Arab village which was part of the landscape of his youth. The filmmaker sets out to discover the different elements that make up this landscape: there was the original Arab village whose population was expelled during the 1948 war; on the same land was built the Jewish neighborhood of Kfar Shalem, populated by immigrants from Iran; and today the town is slated for renewal which will force out the old-time residents, many of whom are resisting the inevitable forces that make way for new high rise apartment buildings.

Before 1948, the area was an Arab village called Salameh. One energetic woman tells a story that, when she was 14-years-old, Menachem Begin approached her, because she spoke Arabic, to spy on the local Arab population and to report back. She told him that these local farmers would not cause any problems. But he decided that they needed to be expelled anyway since they lived so close to Tel Aviv. Later, the destroyed Arab village became part of the landscape of the filmmaker's youth, but at that time, he didn't seem to think about who lived in those homes and what happened to them. Today, he remembers that as kids they played soccer in the yard of the deserted mosque, and, working on the film, he becomes acquainted with the elderly Arab man who once again holds the keys to the holy place of his youth.

The filmmaker's mother died when he was 16 and through interviews with neighbors the viewer learns about her and her community. She came from Ispahan in Iran, which was once a flourishing Jewish community, and she longed to recreate the memories and settings of her youth in her new home. It was not easy for these immigrants to become integrated into Israeli society. One old-timer complains that he never learned Hebrew and he eloquently states, "to be an immigrant is to die before your time."

Integrating the creative use of music and beautiful cinematography with vignettes and human stories, this is a personal film about different populations that have grappled with the difficulties of becoming uprooted as our contemporary national identity has been molded and formed.

The film Longing (52 minutes, documentary, in Hebrew and Farsi, with English subtitles), is distributed by Ruth Diskin.